I use a lot of info from both the website and printed magazine for training, however i went to use the hybrid vehicle webcast last week and it is no longer available. My suggestion being with volunteer departments budgets only getting smaller and time the guys are willing to spend away from home it would be nice to see that great webcasts are available for much longer or made available again in the winter months when small depts. are more likely to be doing class room training.

We actually haven't taken any columns to online only. Certain columns, such as Truck Ops and Fire Prevention, are scheduled to go online certain months, and to be in the print magazine the other months. There are two reasons for this--one, we face significant restrictions in the number of pages we have as postage and paper costs have risen dramatically over the past few years, and advertising dollars haven't kept pace; in fact, they've decreased quite a bit due to the bad economy.

The second reason is that--although we expect to always have a robust print magazine--our long-term strategy involves providing a lot more of our content online, where our readers can get it instantly (rather than waiting 3 weeks for printing and mailing) and they can comment on the articles and talk directly with the authors. More and more of our readers are indicating that they prefer to access information online. So we're slowly starting to change how we do things to meet that need.

Hope this helps... Thanks for reading and please don't hesitate to share any additional feedback you have!

Michael, I'm managing editor for the magazine, so yes, I'm an employee. Tim is wonderful to work with. If you want to discuss contributing, please e-mail me at s.pieper@elsevier.com or Tim at tesenendelbach@msn.com. Looking forward to talking with you!

so... are you an employee of Fire Rescue Magazine or a contributor / author? your posts are informative and well written. I can see that Tim runs a tight shop with some talented folks. I'm hoping to be one of them!